French OVH builds three UK datacentres

January 6, 2017

France's OVH, a European cloud services provider, has announced the construction of its first datacentre in the UK. It will be located in the inner suburbs of London and is planned to be operational as soon as May 2017 with a capacity of 40,000 servers. Once up and running, OVH plans to open two more datacentres in the UK as part of its European expansion strategy, even in light, it says, of Brexit.

The new facility is connected to the worldwide network that the French company has deployed thus allowing the lowest latency possible. These new openings will be made possible following a capital increase of €250m, part of a €1.5bn expansion plan over five years.

Located less than half a millisecond from OVH’s point of presence (PoP) in London, the facility benefits from a direct connection to its datacentres in Gravelines (then Roubaix and Paris), Amsterdam (then Brussels and Frankfurt), Montreal, and New York, through the fibre network that the OVH group has deployed worldwide to allow low latency. Its proximity to two substations makes it possible to provide a high electrical capacity on site.

OVH’s first UK datacentre will cover 4,000 square metres with no colocation space. The two other datacentres that OVH plans to set up in the United Kingdom will provide users with a backup solution: a second site on the outskirts of London, and a third one that is sufficiently remote to be a recovery site outside the failure domain of the two other sites. These three datacenters will be interconnected, like the others of the group, through the vRack, a private network developed by OVH to facilitate the deployment of multisite infrastructures.